All right, welcome listeners to episode 84 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm at Sittman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Heather Bell.

Hey Sam, hi Matt.

I'm so excited for this episode.

I know we say that all the time but the combination of

guests and topic and text really it was one I had so much fun preparing for and

then actually having the conversation.

Yeah, it turned out really great.

Yes, and we explained a lot at the start of the episode,

but you know, really since this summer with the discourse over the Oppenheimer film and also the death of Daniel

Ellsberg.

Daniel Ellsberg was the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers and was a kind of activist against nuclear weapons because he had been a nuclear

planner right in the Defense Department.

That combination of events we just started cooking up something to do with maybe nuclear weapons and we lit upon

both the best answer and the most know your enemy answer which is we decided to take as our text Gary Wills is

really incredible 2010 book called Bomb Power the modern presidency in the national

security state which really traces kind of how the development of the

Adambaum, the processes around it, the secrecy, and so on totally transformed our system

of government to make it almost a kind of permanent presidential

dictatorship because the power to deploy the atom bomb was solely lodged in one man's hands. And we had a great guest and that was Eric Baker.

That's right. He actually went to the same parish in Chicago as Gary Wills.

Yeah. So Eric was Wills-Pilled before any of us, at least me and Sam.

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